The Department of Justice reached a $1.4 billion settlement with Transocean for its role in oil giant BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, which polluted the Gulf of Mexico with upwards of 4.9 million barrels of petroleum in 2010. “What’s important to understand,” says the Environmental Defense Fund’s Elizabeth Skree, “is that this settlement represents the first significant funding specifically allotted for Gulf Coast restoration.”The settlement funds will be paid under the Clean Water Act, with a portion of those funds being used to restore the Gulf. 

A native of Santa Monica, Calif., Janka’s parents divorced when he was young. Somewhat of a wallflower in high school, Janka was raised primarily by his mother and had more success with swimming, soccer and studying than he did with the opposite sex. That’s all in the past. Now Janka is a recognizable face in the Pick-Up Artist community, a collection of alpha-male teachers, mentors and advisers all helping less confident men to answer one question: How can I have more sex with women?

Vietnam, a police state where freedom of expression can come with a multi-year prison term, is awash in cell phones. Whether for talking, texting or taking photos, Vietnamese are buying up mobile devices at a rate exceeding the country’s own population. A sign of the communist nation’s rising affluence, it is also undermining the state’s monopoly on information. With phones available for as little as $20, ordinary consumers are buying up sets that would otherwise have been bound for foreign shores. 

It’s finals week; you’ve been studying in the library for a good six hours and feel your concentration slipping away. The numerous coffees and Redbulls you’ve consumed haven’t helped either. A friend of yours uses Adderall to help him study, and you’ve taken it before as well. Desperate to focus, you call him up and buy a few tablets that will last you the week. This is a common case of prescription drug abuse on college campuses. 

Politics made for strange bedfellows in those taking swipes at President Obama’s white guy appointees. Staunch GOP conservative Mike Huckabee took the first hard whack. He screamed that Obama was a hypocrite on diversity in that he used the issue of the war on women during the presidential campaign to pound the GOP and then turned around and stacked his cabinet with white males. The swing then went over the political spectrum to Harlem Democratic congressman Charles Rangel who called the president’s diversity record, “embarrassing.”

In light of a recent $8.5 billion settlement between federal bank regulators and 10 big banks, 3.8 million homeowners can expect to get a check in the mail. The agreement, announced Monday, calls for $3.3 billion in direct payments to eligible homeowners – people who had home loans with one of the 10 banks in the agreement and who were in some stage of foreclosure in 2009 and 2010. Another $5.2 billion is set aside for other forms of relief to homeowners, including loan modifications.

FCC Commissioner Mignon L. Clyburn says that since then, “tens of thousands of consumers” have “written, emailed, and yes, phoned the commission, pleading for relief on interstate long distance rates from correctional facilities.” Although unfamiliar to most phone users, Global Tel*Link and Securus Technologies Inc. are the two companies responsible for the majority of prison phone calls. Steven Renderos, a national organizer for the Center for Media Justice says that the companies attribute their high rates to “the security features their technology has” including monitoring calls and blocking phone numbers.

As Senator McCain himself repeated relentlessly, American lives were lost at Benghazi and given the obvious lapses in security measures, that is simply unacceptable.  Instead of insisting the focus remain on an examination of those security measures in an effort to ensure that any mistakes made were never repeated, McCain nearly singlehandedly created a political sideshow of questionable value that only distracted attention away from the real and important issues.  If this distraction in any way detracts from identifying and correcting the mistakes made, then another tragedy could possibly occur, one, like that which occurred at Benghazi, could have been prevented if the right people had been paying attention to the right issues.

Is political Islam matching the aspirations of the Arab Spring? Egyptians may have a clear answer after living a few years under a Muslim Brotherhood administration. Early signs from Cairo are not encouraging. President Morsi, representing the Brotherhood, won the post-uprising Egyptian presidential elections for three main factors: support of a relatively well-organized grassroots movement, being a leader of a resilient opposition to a series of corrupt regimes and a promise to take a moderate approach to political Islam. It turns out that the Morsi model of governance is a disappointing mixture of hardline religious fundamentalism, pragmatic capitalism and survival politics. 

According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, The War on Drugs costs the federal government approximately $15-20 billion per year, and with negligible success in lowering the supply of drugs or drug abuse rates, politicians and experts on all points of the political spectrum have deemed the War on Drugs an objective failure. With particular emphasis on cutting off the supply of narcotics, the United States drug policy has been predicated on the theory that eradication of an unwanted external malefactor can only be achieved through persecution of the malefactor and its backers.